Conservatives have said that announcing a timetable for leaving Iraq will give the insurgents confidence and enable them to rally and kill more US soldiers than ever before. Mind you, my only exposure to battle strategy is from reading The Art of War and playing the StarCraft and WarCraft RTS games, but this seems to be in direct opposition to what I would expect. If I were in control of an insurgency, fighting to get back control of my country, and my enemy told me when they’d be leaving, I would go into hiding and stop fighting entirely; my goal could be accomplished simply by waiting. After that, If I still wanted power, I’d still have the resources I did before. (I’m assuming that attrition due to death would roughly equal attrition due to people leaving the group, and that recruiting still takes place.)
Am I missing something, or are the conservatives mixing politics with strategy?
Imagine, your hated enemy, the people who threaten your very religion and way of life suddenly start fleeing, do you stand there and wait, or do you kill them all as they run?
Seems to me that my way of life would be assured if I just waited and didn’t risk my life.
Also, strategic withdrawal is not the same as fleeing. People don’t literally turn their backs and run during a planned withdrawal. One of the problems with modern politics seems to be the insistence on rewording things to change their meaning. Conversations would be more honest if people emphasized denotation over connotation.